Wi-Fi Assist: Enhancing Vehicular Wi-Fi Connectivity with an Infrastructure-driven Approach
Vehicles access the Internet via cellular networks, instead of Wi-Fi networks. This choice has been mostly justified by the ubiquitous coverage of cellular networks: Wi-Fi coverage has been shown to be inadequate in the past, even in urban areas. We argue that providing Internet connectivity to vehicles via Wi-Fi is worth a revisit. Motivated by improvements in Wi-Fi network coverage in recent years, we propose Wi-Fi Assist, an add-on to current Wi-Fi infrastructures which differs from existing solutions in two key ways: (1) it is heavily infrastructure-driven; and (2) defines an interface for low-latency cooperation between different WLAN service sets, managed by different service providers.
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